Hey guys and gals. Another week of Sam and Dan Games has begun! v6.1.1 of Pokemon Tower Defense is now out! You can get your very own Shadow Lickitung by finding the Mystery Gift Code at the link above. (Yes I know he doesn't know Shadow Rush, but you can relearn them move if you want :) )

We are working hard to get you guys some entertainment and at the same time thinking about what the next steps are for us. As an small independent game studio (we aren't even an official company yet, but will be this year) the best thing we can do is create new and exciting games. Pokemon Tower Defense is an exciting game but we really can only do so much with it because we didn't create Pokemon. Which is why you will see us focus on Hero Tower Defense once PTD 1 is over. But I realize that most of you here are fans of PTD and I have created over 400 moves which I plan to maximize. So I will also be working on PTD 2 on the side.

Last week I put up a poll about the Day/Night System for PTD 2 (which I explained last blog) and it looks like the winner is a Dynamic Day/Night System! Because that is the winner I wanted to include more details about it.

The Day/Night System will work similar to how it works in the game. Some pokemon or events will only happen at certain times in the game's clock. But unlike the game the clock will not be based around 24 hours or around your device's time. It will be based on your play time on levels. Each complete day might like 2-3 hours, when you first play the game will be in day time and as you play the time will be changing. About half way through the day you will enter night time. So as you can see it's not tied to any specific time zone or your computer's clock.

Last week I also finished the preloader for the game, so instead of seeing a white screen you will see a percentage on screen and I made a cool little race so you have something to be entertained by while you wait. The race is Chikorita vs. Totodile vs. Cyndaquil as you load your game they will move closer to the finish line and who knows maybe they will evolve. This is just a small detail that I hope you can appreciate while you wait for the game to load.

Also PTD 2 will have a nice little intro scene that Joel, my brother, made. Joel will also be helping make the intro and ending cutscenes for all the levels which will help make them more interesting and detailed. It will also help me complete more since I will have my hands busy with HTD.

PTD 2 TITLE SCREEN CONTEST! Speaking of intro scenes, just like PTD I'm holding a competition for the actual title screen of the game, this time they can't have their own animated intro (since the game will already have an animation to start) but can have animated elements. So no rolling pokeball and pikachu coming out of it but you can have the rollovers or animations in the page itself. For now just put the same elements that the current game has on there. (Start, Options, Feedback, the Mystery Code, Pokemon Tower Defense 2, a Sam Game, and tell us how to make it better) Post these on our forum so other users can comment and give you feedback. The prize will be all 3 SHINY LEGENDARY DOGS! Which won't be available until PTD 2 comes out later this year. Like I said don't email me your entries, post them on the forum. This contest will run for at least a month so you will have time to make them special. Show me what you got!

We are also talking about our third game which is the Creatures Universe game (Project ANPO), you can read more about it here. As the weeks go by I will be talking more about the ideas I have for it on the blog so look forward to that.

This week in PTD we will have a new Story level, new TMs, a new Mystery Gift, new level cap, along with some other bug fixes. I will also put some of my pokemon up for trade, got any special request for what pokemon I should put up for trade? Let me know in the comments. Also let me know which TMs you would like to see this week in the comments. (TMs with moves that are already in the game will be more likely to be added this week)

PTD First Look for v6.2 by GraphicForce!

PTD 1 Progress:

Story Level (100%) - Pallet Town Training

Intro (100%)

Layout (100%)

Waves (100%)

Ending (100%)

Mystery Gift Pokemon (100%) - This is for Monday! MissingNo. The Glitch Pokemon!

Implement in Saving Code (100%)

Stats (100%)

Graphics (100%)

Moves (100%)

Added Toxic to the Pokemon Center's Move List (100%) New TMs (100%)

Hydro Pump (100%) - Being available to more pokemon.

Bulldoze (100%)

X-Scissor (100%)

Fury Cutter (100%)

Sludge Wave (100%)

Psyshock (100%)

Level Cap Increase (100%) - Level cap to 95

Implement in game (100%)

Implement in Saving Code (100%)

Implement in Trading Center (100%)

PTD 2 Progress:

Temporary Title Screen (0%) - The final one will be from the contest winner, but I will make a placeholder one for now.Options Menu (0%) - Adding some more options here, like a logout, and more.

That's all for today! As always let me know what you think! If you have any question about PTD, beating a level or how to get a particular pokemon head to our forums, many people there will be happy to help you. If you have account problems send me an email for everything else leave me a comment below!

Alright we're back! For this release the main attraction is the Skills Selection Screen. This screen does just what it's name implies, it lets you select skills for each of your heroes. The graphics for the menus and everything are still just placeholders while Kevin works on the actual graphics and some features of this screen are still missing but are in the works.

The heroes still come with their standard skills but you can customize them however you like. All you have to do is drag and drop skills from the skills menu into the active skill slots at the bottom middle. You can swap active skills by dragging them onto each other and remove them by dragging them out of their active skill slots.

The skills still follow the same rules as before where they will do their skills in order of priority based on the skill slot position they are in, start with the Native skill which you can't move or change yet. So right now your character will always set the highest priority on the Native Skill first (up to 3 stacks on the enemy) and then skill slot 1, then 2, etc. If a higher priority skill is on cooldown they will automatically skip it and check for the next highest priority skill, and so on till there is an available skill to use. In other words, your heroes will keep busy with the skills you've given them.

There have also been some graphic bugs that were fixed along with giving the male some hair and a cloak to wear. You may also notice that each of screens basically look completely different from each other. Don't worry, it will all become more unified as Kevin finishes the graphics for them which he is currently working on.

On that note, we have brought on another artist to help with HTD. So let's welcome Bill to the team! He will be helping us push graphics along a bit faster and is looking forward to designing some creatures and effects especially along with doing animation in general. Kevin will be helping him out so the graphical style stays consistent and everything moves along smoothly.

That is how close we are! Now keep in mind that there are over 600+ moves in all 5 generations combined so there isn't much left to add move wise if I were to make the sequels. Now you might be wondering things like when is the sequel coming out? or is anpo going to be made?, or just what the heck is this anpo thing? Well I've got answers!

To be honest the sequel hasn't been started yet, starting this week I will post some progress for PTD 2 along with discussions about the changes that I want for the game and also adding polls for you guys to decide some things too. But before I get into that let's talk about what is coming this week for PTD 1.

If you have beaten the Cinnabar Island level you will know that the Gym battle against Blaine is next! Just like other Gym battles you can expect a challenge and some unique twist that will hopefully match the theme of the gym and his pokemon. How this gym will play out is something I will figure out during this week and by the weekend we will have a new story level!

Other than the story level, I will include more TMs that are not yet implemented in the game along with any small bug fixes here and there that I can find.

For PTD 2 I will take a lot of the same code from PTD 1 so it won't take 5 months to build like PTD 1 originally did but I will be making a lot of changes. A good number of them come from request that you guys have made! So the first thing to do in PTD 2 is something that many of you have requested or indirectly requested and that is a PRELOADER! Yes! Finally! I know... PTD 2 progress will be slow and steady but I will share a small list of a few changes and ideas I have for PTD 2:

Preloader! (No more "all I see is a white square" emails!)

Faster logging in - The game will only initially load your current party only to speed up logging in. The rest of your pokemon will now be accessed on a different screen and that will load the rest of your pokemon by boxes.

Box system - Similar to how the game is you will store and load pokemon by boxes and you can sort by box rather than having a long list of pokemon to handle.

Buff and Debuffs stay on - When you move your pokemon from one spot to another it will no longer lose any of it's buffs or debuffs or statuses.

Buffs and Debuffs Stack and stay on forever - Just like the game debuffs and buffs will now stack up to 6 times and they will last until removed or the pokemon faints.

Day and Night levels - I'm not sure exactly how I will handle this, there are two options to pull this off.

One is having two levels for each area, one during the day and one at night.

Two is having a global clock for when you play and the levels adjust to that clock.

While you play a level the time would be changing and it would get darker.

The time would not be in real time, a whole day might pass in 30 minutes.

This is not based on time zones but the time that you spend in the game.

I put a poll up so I can see what you guys think about it!

Genders and Breeding - Pokemon will now have genders and you can breed pokemon using similar rules to the real game. The breeding part will probably be in the pokemon center, but hatching the eggs will most likely be in the game itself. You would put the egg on a spot, some eggs require more time on a spot to hatch than others.

The Power of Badges - Something that I missed for PTD 1 which is your pokemon will only obey you if you have the proper badge, otherwise they will fall asleep. (This would only apply to traded pokemon)

Transferring your old Pokemon from PTD 1 to PTD 2 - I'm still not 100% sure at what point in the game I will allow for trading your pokemon, but what I'm thinking is that you need to get to a certain point in the game before this is allowed. Also the "power of the badges" point prevents people from just bringing level 100 pokemon and beating the game easily.

Holding items - Your pokemon will be able to hold berries and different items that will enable them to use them in levels just like the real game.

Improved Trading Center - The trading center works right now but a lot of things are very tedious to do. Especially if you are trading a lot of pokemon. The plan is to continue to update the trading center to make it more user friendly and streamlined.

Improved Multiplayer - Multiplayer right now is slacking, this is something that I want to improve drastically in the sequel.

This is but a small preview of the improvements I have in mind for the sequel. Now let's talk about Creatures Online Universe aka Project ANPO.

As many of you might know the reason I started programming to begin with was so I could make an online creature game. The world of pokemon was something that I thought was great and it really inspired me to learn programming and find ways to create games. 10 years later here we are and I'm getting closer and closer to finally being able to make this game. Now pokemon is a fine game as it is now but there are a lot of things that I think could be improved. I think they focused a lot of the battling and balancing out the different pokemon for battle and that's is great but the real reason I like pokemon is for discovering the pokemon and I loved watching the show because I could see almost how these pokemon lived in their habitats and how they interacted with each other (something that the show got away from in the later seasons) So the game I want to make is more about that. About going out and exploring and finding new creatures. Rather than just focusing everything on battling. I like battling but when a diglett can use Aerial Ace then it ruins the illusion for me. I liked it when each creature had it's own unique move or something to make them stand out. Details like these are the kinds of things I'm aiming for this game. Does this sound like something you would want to play?

Now you might be wondering what about Hero Tower Defense!? Well Hero Tower Defense has really great art and really great art requires time and motivation is part of the artist. We recently got another artist for HTD that will be working part time so that will help a bit. Once PTD 1 is finished I will spend more time working on HTD while working on PTD 2 and some ANPO on the side. I think a lot of you will want me to work less on HTD but HTD is something that will help us grow and since it's original we can take it to the mobile devices and not worry about it getting shut down.

This release contains mostly bug fixes, some little changes, and small additions. A bunch of these were mentioned by you guys in the comments, so thanks for that!

Melee attacks now hit everything in a small area which includes stacked enemies. The Whelp now has a sound effect when it dies and some other sound effects that have been adjusted. We started implementing the graphics for the Character Customization Screen along with some more features (Note: While the character name field works it doesn't save and you won't actually see it anywhere else in the game so it's a bit pointless right now). You can now also remove characters from your party.

Now on to some other things. The poll Kevin had going on his blog for determining the next graphics to be created for the elemental skills has ended. It looks like the order will be: Water, Light, then Nature. We'll be starting on the water skills soon and then the others will follow in time.

We're working on the skill selection screens and hope to have a rough version of that in for next week's release. As the name implies, this screen will allow you to select skills for your characters so you can set them up how you want. Coming up soon will also be profiles which will be handy since it will allow you to retain all your customizations so you don't have to keep setting things up each time you play.

v5.9.1 is finally out! It's been a nuts I ran into some bugs with the multiplayer that made me a little crazy, I found a workaround for now but it means that for the time being you can't see who you are playing with in multiplayer (They will always have the default avatar and be called Satoshi) other than that I hope you guys enjoy it once PlayTowerDefenseGames updates to the latest version.

TEAM ROCKET STRIKES!

Instead of calling those wonderful hackers well hackers, I will now call them Team Rocket! There was new hack that went public today but I sent it blasting off into space. So no worries! What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and with each new hack that gets fixed the security in the game tightens even more. So thanks Team Rocket for doing your part <3

SCAMS!

I get a good amount of email about people getting scammed and there isn't a lot I can do to help the person that got scammed. Mainly cause it is really hard to prove if somebody got scammed or not.

So to help out, here are some great tips to avoid getting scammed!

NEVER give out your password, this is very important! I will never ask you for your password, anybody that works for me will NEVER ask for it. If somebody ask for your password, it's a scam! Period.

Only do trades that are 6 or less pokemon from each side. Never do trades that require more than one transaction. If one of the transactions you end up giving him really good pokemon for really bad ones than it's a scam.

Ask somebody! Also don't ask the scammer's friend, ask on the message board or ask me if the trade sounds good before doing it.

Okay so this week we will take it easy (I have a test on Thursday >.<) we will have a story level with the PTD First look video will have more details on, some new TMs (Dragon Claw for that commentator that keeps asking for it!) In the new level there will be new pokemon to catch! Wooohooo!

Pokemon that you catch on Cinnabar Island will now be the proper level (100%)

We are getting close to the end of PTD 1 which will mean the rise of HTD and PTD 2 and .... something. So keep checking up on my progress this week and leave me some wonderful insightful full of feedback comments that I love to read so much! Thanks everybody!

This week we mainly worked on getting the Character Customization Screen and Party Screen together. They don't look like much right now but Kevin is working on the graphics which will make them much more appealing. This isn't the final layout either so if it feels a bit clunky don't worry, we're still working on it.

You will now start out at the Party Screen. By selecting a character and clicking "Join Party" you will add them to your group which you will take into battle. We've given you another random skill character to play with so now you can have anywhere from 1-4 characters in your party. There's currently no "Remove" option so just hit "Back" to clear your party if you want to change it.

If you click on Hero at the top it will take you to the Character Customization Screen which lets you do the same things as before except now you can do it to each character separately and there's a fun little option in there for showcasing the character.Note: The male doesn't have any options for Hair or Cloak yet and currently your character settings won't be saved. We'll be adding all this soon.

We've also added several new weapons that you'll see the characters using. The skill list has been moved to the "Play HTD!" page so you can view it while playing. It also just makes more sense to be there rather than picking up so much space here every week. I'll be updating it as we progress as well as posting notes for them here.

Development on the Skill Selection and Skill Behavior Screens as begun and is currently in the design phase. The Skill Selections Screen is pretty self-explanatory but the Skill Behavior Screen is something new we want to implement due to your characters being on autopilot most of the time. Essentially this screen will let you customize each skill in a way that lets you tell describe when and how it's used by the character. For example, you could set up a healing skill to only trigger when a nearby ally or yourself is below 75%. This screen might take longer than the others to get just right but we think it'll be worth it and provide a valuable tool for the player.

Hey guys! V5.8.1 of Pokemon Tower Defense is officially released! Go get your Ponyta and swf, exe, and apk files! I didn't have enough time for the co-op level last week so this week I will see to it. I hope those of you who are far enough enjoyed the Zapdos fight, you can expect similar type of battles for the other birds when we get to them. This week we will continue the story along with some other things.

So to change it up a bit I wanted to talk about what the thought process was for creating the Zapdos fight, and the general process of coming up with a new level for each week.

Step 1: What's going to happen next? - So I have an idea in my head of what the story is going to end like, almost like some bullet points, but the actual details I come up with each week. In this case the gang had just finished spending some time at the Safari Zone, kinda relaxing and just capturing new pokemon. So I thought it was time to make something exciting happen in the story. Your characters had not been to the cycling road so I thought there needed to be a reason to go there. Originally I thought that Gary would show up and tell you that you needed to go to Professor Oak to learn Surf but I didn't want to go to Viridian City again yet since that will be the last gym. I also thought of the possibility of not meeting Gary but another friend on the Cycling Road but I thought I was running out of time and I needed to deal with Gary and the birds in order to move on. Plus I thought the idea of the next level being Gary and the legendary bird would excite the players (you guys). As far as what happens in the level. I always like to make fun of Joey, and just show that our gang still has fun along the way. Also a good reason to travel to the Cycling Road was that they hadn't gone there yet as Joey mentions. Since Gary was running away from the birds I wanted to see him cornered and you show up to save the day! Also making this level with Gary and Zapdos facing off I thought of something interesting for the story and I left some small hints of it in the scene.

Step 2: Level Design - Usually on Monday I will think of the general theme of the next level. Last week was Gary and Zapdos. I knew I wanted to make the fight with the legendary birds.... errr legendary. So I thought okay I want this fight to just be you and Zapdos but Gary is there so he needs something to do. I put that aside for a moment and thought that Zapdos is electric so I want him to be sending out attacks very often and that they should affect your whole group. So since Zapdos will be doing a lot of damage to your party Gary would be perfect to heal your pokemon, similar to Celebi. But I wanted to add more work to the healing, so unlike Celebi you have to actually take your pokemon away from battle to get healed. A player a long time ago suggested an idea to have nurse joy on the side line and you sent your pokemon there to be healed. This was a variation of that idea. Now back to Zapdos. First I thought okay Ground is immune to electric attacks so I would use Drill peck to counter that, which also brought the idea of he being able to target anybody in the field regardless of their position. But I read that flying doesn't do a lot of damage to ground and I didn't want everybody to have to get ground pokemon to beat the level. So I made all damage be a set amount. Also I thought simply removing your units from the field to prevent damage was overplayed and would remove the need to use Gary so I added way for Zapdos to wait for your units to be ready which introduced some bugs (when your party dies the level doesn't end since Zapdos is waiting for a target).

Step 3: Implementation, Balance and Testing (Making it happen!) - This part is the last part to happen, once I have my ideas I set out to animate the scenes make the new characters and create the new moves for the level. In this case most of the characters were done, I just had to make Gary into a Tower and create the new moves for Gary and Zapdos. The new moves can sometimes create technical difficulties. I can spend a good amount of hours bug fixing or just balancing the moves so they do enough damage. Once the bugs are cleared I create a team of pokemon that will be the best to beat the level. In this case I made a team of 6 level 90 Rhydon with Stone edge, I didn't buff them but I thought it would give me a good idea of what kind of damage the players would be able to put out. I played it until it took at least 6 waves to beat him while moving the pokemon around to get healed etc and moving them around to always be attacking Zapdos. After that I tweaked with Zapdos stats a bit to make it just right.

So I hope you guys enjoy seeing what it takes to make the level happen. Now on to the progress list! (Note that Hero Tower Defense Progress will stay in the HTD post from last week)

Decide who will I trade my Shiny Mew (100%) - Congrats to xlawrunes, he caught my eye with his all shiny all psychic team of Psyduck, Jynx, Starmie, Alakazam, Exeggutor, Venomoth! This was a hard choice!Choose a new pokemon to trade for next week - my account is samO (100%) - I'm putting up a big number of shiny and shadow pokemon that I have collect during my journeys! Next week I will trade every one of them, if you see something you like send me an offer!Add new moves to the Pokemon Center's Move List (100%) Finish implementing design to trading pages (0%) - Forgot some >.<Bug Fixes (100%)

Make Route 17 end if your party all faints (100%)

Only one weather effect can be active at a time (100%)

Thanks guys for the continued support, I have a couple of things in the works that I will talk more about next week. I will keep updating this list as the week goes on and....As always let me know what you think!

Hurray, the human male is back in action! Kevin wasn't happy with how the original male turned out so he wanted redesign him. There were also some technical issues we started to notice after finishing the original male which would eventually become a hinderance if we didn't address them now. So with that in mind he built the female in a way that could overcome the technicalities that the original male's build had trouble with and then planned to rebuild the male himself using these new techniques. Overall he turned out well and we're happy with him, we hope you guys think so too!

Now on to other things. We made a bunch of small technical fixes like text telling you if your target is out of range or on cooldown so that the game is more responsive. The Shadow character is now the only one with the wand and primarily uses their Magical skill (Shadow Bite) but will melee if close. Some new sound effects have been added and various bug fixes. Read below for all the details!

Also, we've decided to add a weekly progress list for HTD as well so you can check back and see how far along development is going for the items in the list. It's in the "In the Works" section.

Note: I changed this to be more like an overall progress list rather than a weekly release list. Basically it just lets you see how we're doing. Anything that is at 100% should make it into the next release, otherwise we're still working on it. The list doesn't represent everything we're doing though, just some of the major stuff, we are always fixing bugs and smaller things as well.

What's New:

-Re-added Human Male, he's now more awesome (There's no hair or cloak for him yet)

-Re-added the T1 Physical Fire and Shadow skill effects, they disappeared the last release somehow

-Added sound effect for the Whelp's Melee attack

-Added casting sound effects for the Fireball and Shadow Bite skills

-Added sound effect for Shadow Bite's detonation

-Added "Target is out of range!" notification

-Added "Skill is not ready!" notification

-Changed the skill range indicator graphic to be less intrusive

-Made Focus Fire (When you just click on an enemy without a skill) affect all your heroes. So now they will all go after the target you choose instead of just the hero you currently have selected.

-Made the auto-mode skill selection smarter and less wasteful

-Made Native Skills have a longer cooldown (6 seconds) but will now cancel all skill effects of a countered type on the target.

-Gave the wand to only the hero with the Shadow skills. She will primarily cast her T1 Magical skill but will melee if an enemy is nearby.

-Adjusted the Whelp Melee hit sound effect to be more in sync with the animation

-Fixed a bug that caused the skill range graphic to disappear

Each week I'll list and update the descriptions for the current skills available in the game. That way you guys know what they actually do (eventually there will be in-game descriptions). I'll just provide a brief description for now because the actual damage values and such will be changing a lot as we tweak them. You'll be able to see them in the future though.

Key Terms:

Direct Damage (DD) - Causes full damage instantlyDamage over Time (DoT) - Causes continuous damage over a period of timeDamage after Time (DaT) - Causes damage after a period of time has passed

Here are descriptions for the current skills in the game:

Fire:

Burn (Native Elemental - Stackable DoT - Fire Burning Man Icon) - Sets your target on fire causing it to take continuous damage. Stacks up to five times. Grants the caster a Fire Charge that increases their Fire Damage. A character can hold up to five charges at a time.

Infliction (Native Elemental - Stackable DoT - Shadow Consuming Man Icon) - Inflicts your target with Shadow decreasing it's Physical and Magical Defense. Stacks up to five times. Grants the caster a Shadow Charge that increases their Shadow damage. A character can hold up to five charges at a time.

Note: There isn't a 2H animation yet so really these weapons will just be used with the current swing animation. So imagine them as large 1H weapons for now :P

Kevin currently has a poll going on his blog, KXN @ HTD for determing what order we'll be adding the elemental skills in (Ignore the The Second Element title, he's just extending the time and it won't let him change it). Shadow was winning originally so we did that as the second element already. Looks like Water might be next!

Any feedback is welcome as always, let us know what you think in the comments!